Plotting the Path from Diesel to Electric Trucks
DTNA’s Achenbach keynoting the Green Truck Summit Photo: David Cullen
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DTNA’s Achenbach keynoting the Green Truck Summit Photo: David Cullen
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INDIANAPOLIS — Alternative fuels and propulsion systems offer a compelling array of environmentally friendly powertrain options to consider, but it’s still too soon to write off diesel as trucking’s juice of choice.
Rather, according to Daimler Truck North America’s Wilfried Achenbach, fleets will keep benefiting from increasingly more fuel-efficient diesel trucks as the path to deploying far greener electric-drive trucks in North America is worked out in the years ahead.
“It doesn’t make any sense to go [directly] to electricity,” Achenbach, DTNA’s senior vice president of engineering and technology, explained in his keynote address to the Green Truck Summit held here March 14 ahead of the NTEA Work Truck Show.
“Many people investigate what can be done and what is reasonable. But there is no simple answer. And do not discount diesel.” Indeed, Altenbach almost casually predicted that soon “ten miles per gallon will become the new normal’ for diesel-fueled highway tractors.
Still, Achenbach said the industry will have to move away from diesel if it is ever to meet tightening limits for greenhouse-gas tailpipe emissions.Referencing the watershed Paris Agreement 2016 to cut greenhouse gas emissions globally, he said OEMs have “to put on the brakes if we continue burning diesel as we do today. [If not] we will not be able to live up to those limits.”
Diesel technology has been refined enough over the last 30 years to drastically slash both emissions of particulate matter and NOx, but still to be cut further are CO2 emissions. Achenbach pointed out that trucks still produce 6% percent of CO2 emissions in the U.S.—and 75% of those emissions are generated by long-haul Class 8 trucks.
To bring that down, the Phase 2 GHG rules mandate a 25% fuel-efficiency gain for tractor-trailers by 2027. Achenbach said the upshot will …Read the rest of this story
